Eric Alterman at The Nation writes—If Jeffrey Epstein Faces Justice, It’ll Be Thanks to a Local Newspaper. The decline of regional news will lead to a golden age of corruption:
The hero of this unhappy saga, aside from the brave women who came forward with their stories of abuse and intimidation, is the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, who stuck with this story for two years, winning the confidence of the women and exposing the shocking sweetheart deal that Epstein’s lawyers cut with then-federal prosecutor Alex Acosta as well as the attempt by the office of Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., to reduce Epstein’s sex-offender status.
Brown’s doggedness is even more impressive for its relative rarity. I’ve written here recently about the dangers our democracy faces from the hollowing out of almost every local newspaper in America. Not even Miami, a big, cosmopolitan, coastal city, is immune to this trend. Its parent company, McClatchy, laid off 425 people in 2008–09 alone. Everybody else took pay cuts. Since then, according to a 2018 Columbia Journalism Review profile, the paper has lost many senior reporters and editors not only to The New York Times and The Washington Post as has always been the case, but also to small startups, nonprofits, and the ever-lurking PR firms. Massive increases in web traffic will never make up for lost print advertising and paper subscriptions, and the result is the disappearance of the thing that makes the paper valuable in the first place: news.
Since the layoffs, the Herald has moved toward what it terms an “audience engagement” model, meaning it is trying to figure out what people want to read and then allow that agenda to drive its articles. That might explain why the (remaining) newsroom erupted in cheers when Brown’s Epstein expose displaced a story about farts on its “most read” standings. Human-interest stories have always been part of the menu of any news publication, but the danger today is that clickbait strangles the news people need to know. CJR reports that a journalist named Lance Dixon left that paper last year after having been assigned to cover local government in North Miami and Coral Gables, which have little in common and are nowhere near one each other. Following his departure, his beat was dropped, and a single Herald reporter was assigned responsibility for 30 towns and cities. Imagine how much local news those residents are getting. And perhaps more significantly, imagine how much fun it must be to be a corrupt official in one of those places without a watchdog keeping an eye on the people’s tax money.
According to the Pew Research Center, America’s newspapers lost 47 percent of newsroom employees between 2008 and 2018 and now Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith tells us that the level of attrition in the news business regardless of platform had its worst quarter since 2009 (with a booming economy and stock market, it must be added). [...]
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QUOTATION
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
~~Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—Unprepared for a Flu Pandemic:
If a much-feared pandemic of avian influenza starts sweeping through the world's population anytime soon, neither the United States nor international health authorities will be prepared to cope with it. There is not enough vaccine or antiviral medicine available to protect more than a handful of people, and no industrial capacity to produce a lot more of these medicines quickly.
And they're right. We are horribly unprepared locally, nationally and throughout the world. Part of the issue is how we communicate the need. This article, written for WHO, tries to get at how to talk to folks to address the issues.
Public health officials have a pandemic-size communication problem. Experts believe a deadly influenza pandemic is quite likely to be launched by the H5N1 avian virus that has killed millions of birds and dozens of people in Asia. They are more anxious than they have been in decades. But infectious diseases are unpredictable. H5N1 could disappear--as swine flu did in 1976--and "The Great Pandemic of 2___" could arise from a strain that doesn't even exist yet. Even if H5N1 does cause a human pandemic, it might weaken and produce only mild disease. So it's hard for officials to know how aggressively to sound the alarm. They don't want to be accused of needlessly frightening the public. They also don't want to be accused—later—of leaving the public underprepared for a disaster.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show:
Procedure Man to the rescue! We explain "words taken down" and other rules strategery. Greg Dworkin manages to sneak some polling in, despite all the excitement. Why oversight is so… damn… slow. Roger Stone silenced! Video of Trump being creepy!